Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/146

128 Middle Ages," the Song of Roland, also a production of the eleventh century. The panic passed away, but left behind it a rich deposit of romantic fiction, deriving a beauty unknown to former ages from the high estimate of woman which Christianity and Teutonic feeling had jointly contributed to the collective human consciousness. Utilised in many French narrative poems, this chivalric element first appeared in Italian in the elaborate prose-romance, I Reali di Francia. From this the step to metrical epic was easy, but the awkwardness of the Italian poets' first attempts seems to indicate that it was not taken until the poetic art had reached its period of deepest depression in the early part of the fifteenth century, when the rude and tedious epics Buovo di Antona (Bevis of Hampton), La Spagna, Febus, and Queen Ancronja were probably composed.

Another epic of the same period, without a name, recently discovered, is to a considerable extent the groundwork of the Morgante Maggiore of (1432–87), a humorous poem with a serious purpose, or, at least, unconsciously expressing some of the most serious phenomena of the age. Its mixture of sincere religious feeling and genuine humanity with the most irreverent buffoonery has made it the stumbling-block of critics and literary historians, whose interpretation of its tendencies and estimate of its author's character are usually determined by their own prepossessions. While it is impossible to deny that Morgante's companion, the epicurean gourmand Margutte, is the author's